Your Life Is Your Practice: Insight Meditation Retreat (7 days)

August 15 – 22, 2014 (Friday to Friday)

Registration for this retreat is closed

There may be rides available for this retreat.
You can also offer a ride. Click here to view the listings.

A few spots are open for this retreat.

All scholarship funds have been awarded.

Insight meditation (vipassana in Pali, the language of the original Buddhist teachings) is the simple and direct practice of moment-to-moment mindfulness. Through careful and sustained observation, we experience for ourselves the ever-changing flow of the mind/body process. This awareness leads us to accept more fully the pleasure and pain, fear and joy, sadness and happiness that life inevitably brings. As insight deepens, we develop greater equanimity and peace in the face of change, and wisdom and compassion increasingly become the guiding principles of our lives.

The Buddha first taught vipassana over 2,500 years ago. The various methods of this practice have been well preserved in the Theravada tradition of Buddhism. This retreat is rooted in this ancient and well-mapped path to awakening, and draws on the full spectrum of this tradition's lineages.

This silent course is suitable for both beginning and experienced meditators. An optional daily period of yoga will be offered by Éowyn Ahlstrom.

Teachers

Narayan Helen Liebenson

Narayan Helen Liebenson is a guiding teacher of IMS and the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, and a regular contributor to Buddhadharma magazine. Her training includes over 30 years in the Theravada tradition as well as in Chan with the late Master Sheng Yen.

Listen to one of Narayan's talks: Compassion given at IMS on August 23, 2007 – 45 minutes, 8 MB (Download, Stream)

Greg Scharf

Greg Scharf has practiced with Western and Asian teachers in the Theravada tradition since 1992, and has been teaching residential retreats since 2007. His teaching emphasizes the confluence of love and wisdom on the path to liberation.

Listen to one of Greg's talks: Renunciation given at IMS on April 8, 2011 – 54 minutes, 37.6 MB (Download, Stream)